Problematic Language
by SolarMorrigan
Summary: "It's just a word, Dipper. A thing people say." "It's not just a word, it's a label." Written before the finale aired; cross-posted to Ao3


A/N: Extremely self-indulgent story about autistic Dipper headcanon. The word 'crazy' and many variations thereof are used excessively here, so if you find that sort of language upsetting, please proceed with caution

-/-/-

Dipper didn't know when it had started to bother him. He couldn't pinpoint an exact time or place, couldn't give the exact instance in which he had started to flinch. But it bothered him now, and as it was with all things Dipper Pines noticed, he couldn't seem to let it go.

When they were young, it had only been annoying. Dipper liked things. Well, everybody liked things, that went without saying. The problem with Dipper liking things was that he got _really_ into them. He liked learning everything about them. And he liked talking about them to anyone who asked and sat still long enough.

It wasn't like _Mabel_ didn't ramble about things she liked. It was just that the things she liked were, apparently, more acceptable than the things Dipper liked. Makeup and crafts and boy bands versus monsters and magic and conspiracies.

So when they were younger and Dipper failed to notice the increasingly disinterested or concerned look on the face of whoever he had pinned down into conversation and Mabel suddenly swooped in and said, "Sorry about my brother, he's crazy, don't worry about it!" before carting him off, Dipper only felt irritated that he'd been interrupted.

As they grew older, the irritation began to bubble down into concern. Mabel threw the word around more and more often, stepped in on his conversations more and more often. Even as Dipper got a little bit better at reading facial expressions and felt like he could gauge when the person he was speaking to was growing bored or upset, Mabel still deemed it necessary to intervene, to wave off his words as "crazy" and "loony" and pull him off to do something else. Dipper didn't know what he was still doing wrong, and he hated not knowing things.

But Mabel never seemed to mean anything by it. She said it with a smile, with a teasing expression that Dipper could always recognize on her, even if he couldn't always recognize it on anyone else. Which was why when she shoved him out of the attic room they were sharing in their strange great-uncle's house and told him not to ruin her night with one of his _crazy conspiracy theories_ , Dipper could only stand in the hallway and stare.

The whole thing was odd, because it actually hurt. And maybe it had hurt for a while and Dipper hadn't noticed because Mabel loved him and she didn't mean it, except when she was angry and maybe she did.

It helped a little bit that Dipper had turned out to be right (well, sort of right; who would have guessed Norman was actually five gnomes in a sweatshirt?), but as the summer wore on, Dipper was hypersensitive to the word and all variations thereof.

And every time someone told him he was nuts, every time someone called him insane, every time Mabel said he was _crazy_ , it chafed. By August, it was a raw wound, and Dipper was pretty sure the only reason he hadn't snapped at anyone who told him he was anything less than mentally stable was because he was afraid an outburst would just prove them right. But even that excuse was wearing thin.

Then Stanford appeared.

The real Stanford. The author of the journals Dipper had been so, so interested in all summer. The source of proof that Dipper _wasn't_ insane, because it was all _real_.

And soon enough, Ford became a lifeline. Ford understood what it was like to have names hurled at you and to have them stick, because not everyone was as thick-skinned as Stan and Mabel. Ford understood what it was like to need a friend who shared your interests, instead of just tolerating them. Ford never once called Dipper crazy.

Stan and Mabel made up for Ford's lack of name-calling in spades. As though they sensed some sort of slack now that the ratio had shifted and were filling in the blanks, taking extra time to tell Dipper he was being weird and acting crazy.

The raw wound had barely scabbed over and there it was again, fresh and angry, and Dipper was having more and more trouble telling himself _they don't mean it, they don't mean it, they don't mean it_. Instead, he told himself that he was ready to tell off the next person who called him crazy. He would really do it.

Then the world broke and it didn't really seem like a big deal.

Then the world righted itself (after no small amount of effort or grief) and everything was different and everything was the same and Dipper wasn't sure he was processing things right.

PTSD was a given. They'd all seen terrible things.

It wasn't an easy thing to hide when they came back to California, but considering the term 'Weirdmageddon' meant nothing to the people outside Gravity Falls, Dipper and Mabel couldn't give themselves away. Not if they wanted to go back next summer- and why they wanted to go back to a place that had literally been Hell on Earth was as much of a mystery as anything else about Gravity Falls.

Maybe they were both crazy now.

It didn't stop Mabel from throwing the word around, and it didn't stop Dipper from flinching, physically flinching as though he'd been struck. So it was no surprise that when one of them cracked under the pressure, it was Dipper.

Mabel had always been better with emotions. Lying wasn't like her, and she wore her heart on her sleeve, but when she was determined she could do a lot of things she normally wouldn't have considered. Like lying to her parents and telling them that she didn't need to go see a doctor like Dipper did.

Without the missing piece of the puzzle, the traumatic event of the summer, the doctor couldn't make the connection all the way from Dipper's behavior to PTSD. They settled instead on anxiety, and that was no surprise.

ASD was more surprising, but it explained a lot.

They tested Mabel, too, twins and all that, but by some miracle or genetic blessing, she didn't seem affected. A low statistical probability, but not impossible.

They couldn't cure ASD, being a developmental disorder, but there was a whole slew of medication they could and did throw at Dipper for his anxiety.

The world shuffled and reshuffled itself every time they tried something new. The name-calling stopped for a while and Mabel apologized a lot in the first few months and Dipper wondered somewhere in his half-drugged haze if Mabel would feel better with some anti-anxiety medication, too. She was dealing with things better than he was, because the world wasn't as loud and as bright and as hard for her, but that didn't mean she was alright. She was hurting, too.

Come summertime, anxiety medication number whatever had been holding strong for three months and their parents caved under the twin pressure of twin pleading stares and Dipper and Mabel were back on the bus to Gravity Falls within the first week of summer vacation.

Mabel started to do better. Here, everyone knew, and everyone understood. Here, Mabel could cry or scream or be scared of irrational things and no one would call her crazy. Here, she could start to heal.

Dipper felt like he stayed the same. The medication did its job well enough and that was the best he could ask for. That, and the return of Mabel's full force of effervescence. It helped.

It also brought forth the return of the adjectives Dipper despised. Very clearly despised, because it was true now, wasn't it? He had a diagnosis and medication and everything. Now they weren't teasing him, they were mocking him.

He was crazy and he couldn't help the way he acted and they could wave him off and they were right.

They had always been right.

Dipper asked Mabel one day if she'd meant it when they were younger. When she called him crazy and pulled him away from other people. Mabel shrugged and said it seemed like the thing to say. That it made a good excuse and she never saw the problem.

Dipper shrugged and downed his morning dose of medication. It made a good excuse. So it did.

Over and over and over again, it made a good excuse.

When Dipper wouldn't stop talking about something _weird_. "I'm sorry, he's crazy, don't mind him."

When Dipper misread social cues and Mabel had to swoop in. "He's crazy, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's fine, though."

When Dipper latched onto something and couldn't let it go and it got him into trouble. "My brother's been off his medication, let me just take him home."

Dipper went along with it, because when he didn't, he was just being crazy.

The way Dipper figured, he had been crazy for almost 17 years before he broke.

And when crazy people broke, it wasn't pretty. It mostly involved the world being too loud and Dipper making a lot of inarticulate noises because suddenly he forgot how words fit together and finally tears that just made everything blurry and more confusing because everything was stuck in his chest and he couldn't express any of it and all he could do was cut and run because everyone was staring at him and he couldn't say anything and he couldn't handle the weight of their eyes on him and he was pretty sure he'd start swinging if someone tried to touch him.

Then Dipper didn't really know where he was, because sometimes medication made things a little hazy and sometimes sensory overload made things too sharp to process, and Dipper hadn't really had a destination in mind when he'd left, so he didn't really know where he'd ended up.

Apparently Mabel knew, because she was suddenly there, half hiding behind two sweaters. She was wearing one and holding the other against her chest. She looked… scared. Dipper hoped he was wrong, because facial expressions were hard and sometimes he was wrong, but when it came to Mabel he was almost always right.

"Can I talk to you?" Mabel asked quietly.

"You already are." Dipper replied blankly.

Mabel sat down on the floor across from him. It blandly occurred to Dipper they were sitting in the attic and that he'd somehow managed to wedge himself under the desk. "I mean… if I talk to you, will you get upset again?" Mabel's voice was uncharacteristically quiet and Dipper didn't really like the change, even if he appreciated it.

Dipper shook his head and stared at Mabel's nose. It was about as close to eye contact as he could get right now. "I don't really understand why you got so upset, but I want to fix it." Mabel continued, "We're supposed to look out for each other, and I thought I was. But now you're angry at me and I don't know why."

There were so many words swirling around in Dipper's chest that he couldn't catch a single one. It took him longer than he would've liked to put together a cohesive sentence. "I'm not crazy."

Mabel's brows furrowed in confusion. "I know you're not crazy."

"You keep _calling_ me crazy." Dipper insisted, "You keep saying I'm crazy."

Mabel opened her mouth. Closed it. Frowned. "But I don't mean it like that." She said finally.

She didn't really sound like she believed herself.

"You've been calling me crazy our whole lives, Mabel." Dipper knew that wasn't the sort of response that would further the conversation, but it was all that would come out.

"It's just a word, Dipper. It's a thing people say." Mabel shrugged helplessly, clinging tighter to the blue sweater wrapped in her arms.

"It's not just a word, it's a label." Dipper scrambled to patch up the argument he'd been preparing for years; most of it was in shambles, spread across his mind in the aftermath of a breakdown, but he made due, "I know I'm not normal and I'm never going to be, but that doesn't make me crazy, either."

"I don't think you're crazy, Dipper." Mabel's voice hitched.

"Then stop calling me that!" Dipper snapped, "You and everyone! Telling me I'm crazy, calling me insane, saying I'm off my fucking meds! There's something wrong with me and now nothing I say matters!"

"But…"

"I can't even talk to people anymore because I'm too scared. I'll start rambling about something _weird_ and then you'll come in and explain that I'm crazy and I don't know what I'm saying and then they'll know and I'll… and I don't know." The tears were back because the words were drying up.

But Mabel was teary, too. "You never said it bothered you." She practically had to whisper to get the words to come out right.

"Well I tried; look how that turned out," Dipper mumbled, "I'm under a desk. I don't even remember getting under the desk."

"Do you… want to come out?" Mabel offered.

Dipper shook his head. "…like it under here."

The half statement seemed to be enough and Mabel stayed still. "I'm sorry." She said eventually, "If I knew it really upset you…"

"You wouldn't have believed it upset me until something like this happened." Dipper dismissed the excuse.

Mabel looked like she'd been hit. Dipper felt like he should feel bad, but things were still hazy and sensations and emotions weren't reaching him like they were supposed to. He tried to do something about her pained expression anyway, like a reflex. "You always push me out of my comfort zone. And it usually turns out okay, but… I think sometimes you don't know it's too much." Dipper tried to explain.

He didn't want her to feel like a villain. Mabel had never been a bad person and Dipper wouldn't have dreamed of trading her for all the polite, politically correct adjectives in the world. He just needed her to understand.

And the benefit of having a twin, of being really close to your sibling, is that they understand what you're not saying sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. This time, Mabel seemed to understand enough. "I'll stop." She promised, "No more c-word."

Dipper snorted. "Maybe no more i-word, too? Maybe no more mentioning my medication to people?"

"I'll stop all of it." Mabel promised, "And I'll make everyone else stop, too."

"Mabel, you can't make _everyone_ stop." Dipper shifted to rest his head against the side of the desk.

"Well I'll get Grunkle Stand and Grunkle Ford and Wendy and Soos and Candy and Grenda and- and Pacifica, I'll get all of them to stop, and then they can help me make everyone else stop." Mabel said resolutely.

"Problematic shit doesn't stop just because… eight people stop saying the word 'crazy'." Dipper couldn't help but point out logical flaws, no matter how grateful he was for Mabel's support.

"Well, it starts stopping somewhere," Mabel shifted and held out the sweater she'd been strangling, "Do you want this?"

One thing Mabel _had_ learned and had learned early on was about weight and texture. She made sweaters in Dipper's size out of heavy, textured yarn and pulled them out when he was feeling overwhelmed, because she almost always seemed to know, even if he hadn't just been making random loud noises down in the gift shop.

Dipper reached out and took the sweater and Mabel was careful not to brush his hands with hers. The fabric was soothing to run his fingers over and over and over, and he was sure it would feel nice to put on, but that involved other problems. "I don't want to take off my hat." He mumbled, looking down at the sweater.

Crazy person problems.

"It's got a stretchy neck. It'll go over your hat." Mabel promised, and didn't say anything else.

Dipper unrolled the sweater and began to pull it over his head. The neck did, in fact, stretch over the bill of his hat and Dipper banged his elbows into the walls of the desk twice before the garment was settled. Sitting over his t-shirt and his flannel, the sweater was snug enough that it gave the vague impression of an embrace without ever having to touch someone. It was nice.

"Do you still wanna stay under the desk?" Mabel asked.

Dipper nodded, wrapping his arms around his midsection. "A little longer."

"Mind if I stay?"

Dipper shook his head. Mabel smiled and started up a steady stream of words. Dipper didn't comprehend half of them, but he knew the expression on Mabel's face meant she was rambling and that if he just let the words flow over him instead of listening to them, there would be no harm done.

It took a long time to train yourself out of a habit, or into a new one. Dipper knew that as well as anyone. But Dipper also knew that Mabel kept her promises and even if she stumbled, she would get there.

And for now, that was enough.

-/-/-

A/N: I really hope this goes without saying, but I was in no way trying to portray Mabel as cruel or thoughtless; I only meant that sometimes people can be hurtful without realizing it. It doesn't mean they aren't sorry or aren't willing to modify their behavior when they realize they _are_ being hurtful


End file.
